Hey, how you doing? Justin back with
you today to talk about why I think you
should have your own personalized songbook.
Now, there's a few different options for this.
The one that I recommend most is
getting a display folder, like those
little small folders with the clear sheets in it
where you can put in pieces of paper.
And the idea would be every time that
you're learning a song that you really like,
you print out a little sheet with the lyrics
and the chords above the lyrics
and you pop it in your repertoire book,
and that becomes part of the songs
that you're gonna practice regularly.
I think it's a really important part
of the process is having this repertoire,
a bunch of songs that you can play confidently,
whether you're gonna play just for yourself
or for family and friends, or you wanna aspire to do a gig one day,
or whatever, having all of your songs collected in the one place
is a really, really good idea, maybe once a week
or once a month you go through and you
practice all of those songs up.
If you go to a party or something, you've got your guitar with you.
I think the best thing about it really is being able to
share it with other musicians.
So if you go to a party, you've got your guitar,
you've got your repertoire book, you can grab the book out.
If everyone wants to have a sing-a-long,
you've got the lyrics printed out nicely there.
If there's another guitar player or piano player or whatever,
another instrumentalist, they can look at it and play along with it as well.
You don't have to be scrounging around on your phone
trying to find the chords on... some guitar tab website or whatever
and then it's really small and difficult to read.
Same with the singing you know everyone can gather round
and look at the words cos you've printed it out nice and neatly.
There are a couple of things that
other options that might be more
convenient to your lifestyle. For example, if you go to a party
and you don't have your guitar but there's a guitar there.
One of the things that I've done myself is
I have all of the songs that I really like playing
saved as PDF files in my Dropbox
which I can access from my phone.
Now I already said that reading it off the phone is a bit inconvenient
but at least I've got my arrangements of it there
and if somebody else had a computer or whatever,
I'd be able to email it off to them or look at it on a big screen
or even maybe potentially print it out if you wanted to go that far.
So I guess my recommendation would be to have a paper version
that you carry around with your guitar and potentially save them
all as PDF files as well, so you've got
them as, you know, mobile on your phone
or on a cloud storage or whatever fancy.
Maybe by the time you watch this video
there's some other new method of doing it that's more convenient again.
But the important thing here really
is the construction of the repertoire book.
There's something about making
a repertoire as well that helps consolidate it.
It's almost like printing out the pages
or saving them into a folder or whatever,
seems to make a difference in your mind
that, yeah, these are my repertoire,
these are the ones I'm gonna remember,
it's like it frees up a bit of hard drive space
somewhere in your mind to help you remember them.
I'm sure the creation of the folder has something to do with that,
I don't exactly understand how that works
but I've seen it lots of times with
students over the years so it's definitely
something that I'd recommend that you get into doing.
One thing I would warn you against is not having too many songs
in there to choose from because it can be a bit overwhelming
if you got like a hundred songs in your repertoire book.
I'd tend to keep like twenty songs that I'm kind of
feeling I'm enjoying playing at the moment
that I wanna keep fresh.
I quite often get asked to play at parties or whatever.
It's one of those things it's like what's your favorite song? oh I don't know!
What songs can you play on the guitar? I can never remember them.
So having a little list of some cools songs that I can go,
yeah I can play this song or this song. How about that one?
You know, having the sheets around for me if I'm playing with other people
that may be beginners or whatever.
I've kept a bunch of the songs fairly simple that I can do some fancy
pants stuff on, but it's still nice and simple for anyone else
who happens to be joining along as well.
So see if you can create your own repertoire book.
Keep a note of what the songs are,
Again, we've got a repertoire book, songbook section on the website,
so if you've signed into your dashboard you can save them there.
If you happen to be using my beginners song course app,
there's a playlist there where you can save your songs into the playlist as well.
All of these things are effective and fun.
It just depends on kind of,
you know, what version you're most likely
to have with you when you might be playing with other people.